Pure Imagination: 'The Neverending Story'

IF YOU'RE AN '80s baby, nostalgia might draw you to Imagination Stage's final production for the 2007-08 season, "The Neverending Story."

What legwarmer-clad child didn't want to ride that big, flying dragon-puppy creature brought to life in the 1984 film version of german novelist Michael Ende's 1979 book, "Die Unendliche Geschichte"?

Adapted by Canadian playwright David S. Craig, Imagination Stage's rendition focuses on the lighter parts of Ende's existential examination of the depths of the imagination. Young Bastian is a loner — he'd rather read a good book than develop Nintendo thumb — who escapes his dismal reality of torturous bullies via the pages of a gripping book he "borrows" from a shop owner who refuses to sell to children. (Boo! Hiss!)

Inside the book, he discovers the whimsical world of Fantastica, which is being threatened by the Nothing, a darkeness that destroys everything and is slowly killing the land's ruler, the Childlike Empress.

To save Fantastica, the Childlike Empress send's Atreyu, a boy of Bastian's age, on a quest to stop the Nothing. After trekking with his trusty Luck Dragon, Falkor, through the Swamp of Sadness to the cave of a giant spider and on to the maze of the Southern Oracle, Atreyu survives his journey but realizes he cannot save the Empress.

It is Bastian who turns out to be the hero of "The Neverending Story." Through his belief in the story, he realizes he is the human child Atreyu had been searching for all along. It is his imagination that ultimately stretches to rename the Childlike Empress and save all of Fantastica.

» Imagination Stage, 4908 Auburn Ave., Bethesda; through Aug. 10, $10-$20; 301-280-1660. (Bethesda)

Photo by Scott Suchman